Like all relationships, there must be connections on a regular basis in order to have a chance at success. The Internet is no different, especially when it comes to marketing your photography. Relationship, relationship, relationship is the name of the game. I wonder if it's possible to create a fungible set of relationships between my subjects, my feelings, my blog, and my image website?

I've recently completed a week long class in eCommerce and now see the importance of a serious understanding of relationships in service businesses. Photography, as I practice it, is purely a relationship business. I really enjoy the interactions with my clients and sharing my photographic insights and experiences with them. These dialogs really help me tune into the perspectives of my clients in a way that allows me to merge what they feel they want to see in the images I produce and what I feel about the subjects we're working with. There's no better feeling than to shoot an image and have your client embrace what they see as their own.

Suggesting that photographer and subject "relationship" is central to the practice of photography confuses some people and strikes a note of agreement in others. As the photographer I've resolved to acknowledge my feelings as integral to my work. When I'm shooting a person or situation that resonates with some part of my culture, sense of beauty, social consciousness, prejudices, etc., I can't help but feel that there is an impact on my construction of any image that I create of the subject or situation. As a subject in a photographic relationship, I am aware of my self consciousness as I stand still to pose or as I move about and try to ignore the photographer at work. Do I modify my "normal" behavior in anticipation of being photographed; do my subjects do the same thing. How can my relationship with my subjects influence their presentation of self in their images?

I was looking for some sense of photojournalist responsibility for the images they created while covering stories. How did they chose to compose the images; from what perspective, on and on. As a photographer I knew that I intuitively selected the angles and perspectives, the depth of field in a shooting situation in order to reproduce the image, and hopefully, the feeling I was experiencing as I captured an image. I was trying to tell the story I saw. This very admission removes any sense of objectivity from the image making and ties the reproduced image to the photographer and their discourse.

I strongly feel that this kind of subjective ascription of photographers feelings and discourse enters ever y photographic image. The photographers feelings and relationship to the subject is reflected in the finished image.

I'm finding the business of photography full of relationships. I really love the feelings I have when I'm shooting weddings. Portrait photography feels different; it's much more intimately intrusive. When I shoot events sometimes I feel invisible. I've just now decided to explore these feelings of relationship in that they seem to arise spontaneously and frame the quality of the photographic engagement. It's difficult to write and reflect on these feelings in that I have to link the people, experiences of fleeting moments, and image outcomes. Somehow there's a link, an intuitive spark, that emerges during a shoot and tends to power the artistic construction of the situation.